Write Markdown with 8 Exceptional Open Source Editors

Markdown

By way of a succinct introduction, Markdown is a lightweight plain text formatting syntax created by John Gruber together with Aaron Swartz. Markdown offers individuals “to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML)”. Markdown’s syntax consists of easy to remember symbols. It has a gentle learning curve; you can literally learn the Markdown syntax in the time it takes to fry some mushrooms (that’s about 10 minutes). By keeping the syntax as simple as possible, the risk of errors is minimized. Besides being a friendly syntax, it has the virtue of producing clean and valid (X)HTML output. If you have seen my HTML, you would know that’s pretty essential.

The main goal for the formatting syntax is to make it extremely readable. Users should be able to publish a Markdown-formatted document as plain text. Text written in Markdown has the virtue of being easy to share between computers, smart phones, and individuals. Almost all content management systems support Markdown. It’s popularity as a format for writing for the web has also led to variants being adopted by many services such as GitHub and Stack Exchange.

Markdown can be composed in any text editor. But I recommend an editor purposely designed for this syntax. The software featured in this roundup allows an author to write professional documents of various formats including blog posts, presentations, reports, email, slides and more. All of the applications are, of course, released under an open source license. Linux, OS X and Windows’ users are catered for.

Remarkable

Let’s start with Remarkable. An apt name. Remarkable is a reasonably featured Markdown editor – it doesn’t have all the bells and whistles, but there’s nothing critical missing. It has a syntax like Github flavoured markdown.

With this editor you can write Markdown and view the changes as you make them in the live preview window. You can export your files to PDF (with a TOC) and HTML. There are multiple styles available along with extensive configuration options so you can configure it to your heart’s content.

Other features include:

Syntax highlighting

GitHub Flavored Markdown support

MathJax support – render rich documents with advanced formatting

Keyboard shortcuts

There are easy installers available for Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, SUSE and Arch systems.

Atom

Make no bones about it, Atom is a fabulous text editor. Atom consists of over 50 open source packages integrated around a minimal core. With Node.js support, and a full set of features, Atom is my preferred way to edit code. It features in our Killer Open Source Apps, it is that masterly. But as a Markdown editor Atom leaves a lot to be desired – its default packages are bereft of Markdown specific features; for example, it doesn’t render equations, as illustrated in the graphic above.

But here lies the power of open source and one of the reasons I’m a strong advocate of openness. There are a plethora of packages, some forks, which add the missing functionality. For example, Markdown Preview Plus provides a real-time preview of markdown documents, with math rendering and live reloading. Alternatively, you might try Markdown Preview Enhanced. If you need an auto-scroll feature, there’s markdown-scroll-sync. I’m a big fan of Markdown-Writer and markdown-pdf the latter converts markdown to PDF, PNG and JPEG on the fly.

The approach embodies the open source mentality, allowing the user to add extensions to provide only the features needed. Reminds me of Woolworths pick ‘n’ mix sweets. A bit more effort, but the best outcome.

StackEdit

StackEdit is a full-featured Markdown editor based on PageDown, the Markdown library used by Stack Overflow and the other Stack Exchange sites. Unlike the other editors in this roundup, StackEdit is a web based editor. A Chrome app is also available.

MacDown

MacDown is the only editor featured in this roundup which only runs on macOS. Specifically, it requires OS X 10.8 or later. Hoedown is used internally to render Markdown into HTML which gives an edge to its performance. Hoedown is a revived fork of Sundown, it is fully standards compliant with no dependencies, good extension support, and UTF-8 aware.

MacDown is based on Mou, a proprietary solution designed for web developers.

ghostwriter

ghostwriter is a cross-platform, aesthetic, distraction-free Markdown editor. It has built-in support for the Sundown processor, but can also auto-detect Pandoc, MultiMarkdown, Discount and cmark processors. It seeks to be an unobtrusive editor.

ghostwriter has a good feature set which includes syntax highlighting, a full-screen mode, a focus mode, themes, spell checking with Hunspell, a live word count, live HTML preview, and custom CSS style sheets for HTML preview, drag and drop support for images, and internalization support. A Hemingway mode button disables backspace and delete keys. A new Markdown cheat sheet HUD window is a useful addition. Theme support is pretty basic, but there are some experimental themes available at this GitHub repository.

ghostwriter is an under-rated utility. I have come to appreciate the versatility of this application more and more, in part because of its spartan interface helps the writer fully concentrate on curating content. Recommended.

ghostwriter is available for Linux and Windows. There is also a portable version available for Windows.

Abricotine

Abricotine is a promising cross-platform open-source markdown editor built for the desktop. It is available for Linux, OS X and Windows.

The application supports markdown syntax combined with some Github-flavored Markdown enhancements (such as tables). It lets users preview documents directly in the text editor as opposed to a side pane.

The tool has a reasonable set of features including a spell checker, the ability to save documents as HTML or copy rich text to paste in your email client. You can also display a document table of content in the side pane, display syntax highlighting for code, as well as helpers, anchors and hidden characters. It is at a fairly early stage of development with some basic bugs that need fixing, but it is one to keep an eye on. There are 2 themes, with the ability to add your own.

ReText

ReText is a simple but powerful editor for Markdown and reStructuredText. It gives users the power to control all output formatting. The files it works with are plain text files, however it can export to PDF, HTML and other formats. ReText is officially supported on Linux only.

About The Author

Steve Emms is the main author of OSSBlog.org. This site aims to promote open source software and hardware. Steve has written thousands of articles about open source software. He is also the creator of LinuxLinks.com.

15 Comments

StackEdit’s last commit was March 2016 – so less than an year. I don’t see anything to indicate it has been abandoned. And it’s not uncommon for open source software to have a hiatus in development but then kickstart back. And being open source, anyone can fork.

For markdown, I have used ReText for a while, as I prefer native rather than browser/electron apps. I recently began to use [Typora](http://typora.io/) which is available as an AppImage and has a lovely distraction-free interface.

I just tried Haroopad with some MathJax files I created with MacDown. Right now, it is not usable for me because it leaves line breaks in the input as line breaks in the output, instead of making longer lines. I would be grateful If anyone knows how to fix this.